Is It Health Care to Miss Top Healthy Practice? - Doctors Don't Exercise

According to work published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine (December 2, 2008 with several follow-ups) a survey of 61 hospital physicians, "found that only 21 percent get the recommended 30 minutes of moderate exercise at least five days a week." The results for physicians was lower than the percentage of the general population. Results for physicians was less than half the percentage "of the overall population in the same age group who claim to meet this goal."

The doctors blamed, "lack of time, lack of motivation, and lack of workout facilities." However, the study checked physicians with a gym at their hospital and found they, "didn’t fare any better than those without."

This is not like someone who knows healthy practices but makes a conscious decision to live their life differently by choice. This is like a mechanic who drives an unsafe car because he has no idea how to keep it in good running condition or has faulty knowledge and performs practices that make it run worse.

The mindset that you must stop your busy day to get exercise is the core of the problem. The idea that you stop your life, then go "do health," then resume your unhealthy life, is not health as a lifestyle, it is not health care, and it results in many people feeling they cannot take time away from their "real life" in order to exercise because health is not their real life. The practice of medicine should not be procedures to "do" to counter poisonous lifestyle. My colleague Dr. Tom Kessler calls that, "committing medicine."

There is no need to go to a gym to get exercise. Healthy lifestyle means how you move and live all day, and would yield much healthy exercise just by changing movement habits of the same bending, lifting, standing, sitting, and other daily life to healthier ways. The following Fitness Fixer resources show how.